regiment to
surrender its colours.

CHAPTER VIII

DEALINGS WITH DIANA

The philosophy of Horatius is supposed to represent incompletely the
content of heaven and earth, but neither earth nor heaven, as at present
constituted, would be capable of enclosing the entire content of Dr
Bataille's memoirs. Miss Diana Vaughan, with whose history we are next
concerned, comes before us under a different aspect. I have failed to
ascertain under what circumstances she first became known in France. _Le
Diable au XIX^e Siecle_ may have constituted her earliest introduction;
she was certainly unknown to Leo Taxil when he published the Palladian
rituals, or she would not have escaped mention in the account he there
gives of Miss Sophia Walder. However this may be, we have made her
acquaintance in the course of the previous chapter, but I am constrained
to state that she has, up to the present, shown herself exceedingly
circumspect in substantiating the evidence of her precursor.

The whole world is aware, and I need not again repeat, that Miss Diana
Vaughan was converted to the Catholic Church some time after Dr Bataille
completed his astounding narrative. A Palladist of perfect initiation,
comprehending the mysteries of the number 77, and doing reverence to the
higher mystery of 666, Grand Mistress of the Temple, Grand Inspectress
of the Palladium, and according to him who, in a sense, has prepared her
way and made straight her paths, a sorceress and thaumaturge before
whose daily performances the Black Sabbath turns white, Miss Vaughan
quarrelled, as we have seen, with a sister initiate, Sophia Walder, and
conceived for the Italian Grand Master, Adriano Lemmi, the charity of
the evil angels, which is hatred. When the Supreme Dogmatic Directory of
Universal Freemasonry was removed from Charleston to Rome and the
pontificate passed over to Lemmi, as the revelations allege, Miss
Vaughan closed her connection with the Triangles, carrying her colours
to a vessel equipped by herself, and founded a new society under the
title of the Free and Regenerated Palladium, incorporating the
Anti-Lemmist groups, and soon after began a public propaganda by the
issue of a monthly review, devoted to the elucidation of the doctrines
of the Lucifer cultus and to the exposure of the Italian Grand Master.
To hoist the black flag of diabolism, as Miss Vaughan would now term it,
thus in the open day, naturally elicited a strong protestation from t